Are You or Someone You Know a Lost Cause?

I have a friend who despite the best efforts of his parents, friends and role models always makes the wrong decisions. When it would seem like the right decision is obvious and that no one could make the wrong choice, somehow my friend makes the wrong decision. Do you know someone like that? Are you like that? You see my friend is intelligent and has a great deal of common sense but has a very small amount of moral understanding. My friend also seems to see God and the Church as an authority figure in his life that he doesn’t need at the moment. No matter how hard I try to share the beauty of God’s kingdom with him, he resist. It’s not just the resistance that bothers me but rather it is how close he gets to giving his life to Christ and then for whatever reason chooses to walk away. Afterward I walk away feeling like I have failed and that he is a hopeless case or in other words I am continually beating my head against the wall. Have you ever felt that way about a person or situation? Have you ever felt that something is impossible or that you will never succeed? I think all of us have felt that way and we will again at some point in our life.

The feeling of beating our head against the wall can be felt in our relationships, in our education, in our careers, in the socks that you always seem to lose or the item you keep dropping when you do not have enough arms to carry everything you need to carry. You see all of us at times feel that something or someone is a hopeless cause; however, this should not be the case. In fact if we believe the Bible then nothing is ever hopeless but rather everything is full of hope! I will conclude this post with a quote about the Bible’s perspective on hope and pray that whatever the circumstance, big or small, that you will always believe that your cause is not a lost cause!

“The Bible tells me that God can make a human being out of a pile of dirt, that God can make a barren old couple the proud parents of a chosen people, that God can heal the sick and feed the hungry and raise the dead. If I believe that, then I cannot also believe myself or anyone else to be a lost cause” (Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life).